In 2002, the UN asked Russia to provide evidence to back an audacious territorial claim on the North Pole and 1.2 million square kilometres of oil and gas-rich Arctic sea floor around it. Now geologists in Russia say they have found that evidence.
According to Komsomolskaya Pravda – a newspaper owned by energy and gas interests – recent acoustic scans show that the Lomonosov ridge, a 100-kilometre-wide seabed mountain range, extends from Russia’s eastern Arctic coastal shelf all the way to the North Pole. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Russia could argue that this…
